So, another day, another Google announcement that shakes the foundations of social and search strategies. Or does it? Here are our initial – and I stress initial – thoughts on Google +1. Right now we’re focusing on the search side of this as that’s the initial thrust of Google’s announcement, and where most consumers will encounter this functionality first.

What is Google+1?

Simply put, it’s Google’s equivalent of the Facebook “like” button – a way of saying “I like this” or “I recommend this”. Of course, Google aren’t using the word “like” anywhere in their PR.

Consumers can click it in both paid and natural search results – for the former, advertisers have to add it as an option. It’s very important to note that consumers need to be signed in to a Google account (AdWords, Analytics, Gmail etc) to see the button and click it. We have to wonder how many consumers are aware they have a Google Account as a result of using one of Google’s products – it’s not something Google have historically promoted.

If you are wondering about your own Google Account at this point, see this page and login to see which products Google associates with your login – and edit your Google Profile. Yes, you have a Google Profile too. Which brings to me to where Google+1 “likes” appear.

Your Google Profile

If you have a Google Account, you have a Google profile. It might not be public, you might never have filled it in, but you do. You can check yours here https://profiles.google.com/

When a consumer clicks the +1 button, this recommendation is shown in their public Google profile. As shown by Mashable’s example :

Will this Impact Search Results?

Yes. Google have stated this will affect SEO/natural search rankings. So, if your brand gets lots of +1 clicks, it could boost your position in results as Google views your site as “recommended” and therefore of interest to it’s consumers. No guarantees, as ever with Google.

Of course, there will be companies who try to “game this”. We already seen a brand encourage retweets as part of a competition, for example, on Twitter. Brands and their agencies will need to decide what they can do to encourage these clicks without crossing the line – and of course, Google will continue to develop their algorithm to counter such efforts; no doubt a sudden flurry of +1 clicks will be seen as of less value that a continual steam of them that suggest genuine “recommendations”.

This also means every time you click the +1 button you are effectively working for Google, helping them improve their results.

Paid Search and +1

PPC advertisers can opt to include the button on their ads. UPDATE: Google tell us will be enabled for all PPC adverts if the searcher is logged in. Then, when logged in consumers can click it and their friends (as determined via Google’s Profile system) will see they did so, as show in these two images from Google, where “Brian Walker” clicked to recommend an ad.

Will this Change PPC Quality Score and Rankings?

No. Google have clearly stated that unlike natural search, this won’t be used at the present time to determine rankings etc. No surprise – there’s an even clearer financial gain to gaming this if it did impact QS and therefore CPCs.

UPDATE: Whilst it might not affect Quality Score, it could increase CTRs and therefore have a beneficial advantage in PPC.

Beyond Search

Like Facebook’s “Like” button, Google will offer a version of this for brands to put on their websites – so start putting real estate on your site aside now.

This is when the +1 button will really take off – consumers may not be logged in, ignore it or not know what it is in search results. Engagement rates on features like “block site” and earlier feedback mechanism in search haven’t been high. On the websites of brands they like, however, they are much more likely to click the +1 button.

Big Brands Gain the Most?

One of our initial reactions to this here is that big brands will gain the most. They have the brand awareness, brand search volumes and onsite traffic levels to attract the most clicks via SERPs and more significantly via their websites when they’ve integrated the button – just like with Facebook’s button.

We’ll blog more and speak to our clients direct as we assess this more, but for now, here’s the initial action points we recommend:

1.     Educate your colleagues – they’ll start seeing the button on English language searches soon (send them this blog’s URL!)

2.     Warn your developers you’ll need some screen space in the future – unfortunately, date TBC from Google on the onsite button at the time of writing

3.     Discuss this for PPC with your agency – will your brand be recommended? Will this improve your CTRs – or a competitors to your disadvantage? Will Google’s Profile network actually connects your consumers and their friends? The penetration of Google in the UK at 90%, for example, won’t translate to that sort of penetration into consumer’s friend network via Google Profiles (did you know you could have one until today?) You can opt out – see the end of this post.

4.     Discuss your SEO and Social integration strategy with Steak. This is something we’ve been doing with clients for some time – in fact, we first engaged in the Yahoo Answers for brands awareness and SEO reasons for a client back in 2008. We’ve written about SEO and Social regularly on Search Engine Watch too.

5.     Open a Google Profile, and try this out for yourself – that’s the best way to understand it further.

Conclusion

This will be big – because it’s from Google. The real growth in +1 clicks will be once it’s onsite and not just in SERPs; but for search it is now part of strategies going forward.

In social, this could be the way Google finally manages to attract consumers to it’s social platform – whatever that will look like beyond a Google Profile – but it’s early days. It’s not a Facebook or Twitter killer, that is for sure; if anything, Google will try to be the place your profiles merge and connect across social networks and their product network.

The question is: do you actually want to connect those worlds? We’ll leave that hanging in the air for now…

We’ll post more search and social thoughts as our analysis of this develops.

Sources:

Google’s +1 Announcement
Mashable’s original post

UPDATE: We’ve just had an email from Google UK – sign-up to find out when the onsite button is available here.

UPDATE 2: It’s not opt in for PPC; it’ll be turned on as standard (above edited accordingly). AdWords customers can request an opt out here.

John Barton

Head of Planning & Social Media

Thanks to some great investigative journalism, and a degree of open-ness from the two major search engines, we now have a degree of confirmation that social media links and mentions are indeed part of the ranking algorithms. This post appeared on Search Engine Land yesterday and confirms what many in the industry have been saying, publicly or privately for some time now.

Much of this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in SEO, the engines are always looking to refine their algorithms to serve better results based on what people expect to see when they search for particular keywords. Where better to look for that data then in the social media arena?

What this means for clients depends, to a degree on what their existing social media footprint looks like. No one should be advocating building hundreds of fake social media profiles and spamming everyone to death, the message from Google is as always leaning towards quality over quantity. So it would be more beneficial to get mentioned by one person with 750,000 followers than to get thousands of mentions from people with 0.

At Steak we don’t see Social media and SEO as mutually exclusive in terms of outreach, building relationships with key influencers and CRM policy in general. Using Social Media to build search authority means that it is more crucial than ever to ensure that campaigns are engaging innovative open and organic.

We have all seen the PR disasters from the likes of Nestle on their Facebook profile, and Google’s message is that far from  increasing your ranking due to getting lots of coverage, the negativity of that coverage will act to reduce ranking value rather than improve it.

What this means for clients is that alongside all of the KPI metrics that an SEO agency should monitor and take steps to improve, the following metrics should be added:

-      number of posts made

-      number of SM mentions (probably categorized into Twitter/Facebook etc)

-      number of direct responses (positive v negative)

-      number of links

That’s arguably not an exhaustive list, tools like Radian 6 may throw up other potential ranking factors that could be monitored. The key as always in SEO is to keep on top of what people are doing on the web and always consider how the information they share could be useful indicators of quality, how you might impact it for the better on behalf of your clients (or how they could impact on it themselves) and test your SEO theories whenever you get the chance.

We are very excited to announce that Steak won the sought after DADi award for ‘Best Digital Media Strategy’ for our work with Swiftcover.com and the ‘Summers’s Hottest Playlist’. Steak, also received a commendation for ‘Best Use of Organic Search’ for  Virgin Holidays.

The ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’ campaign harnessed the passion of Swiftcover’s music-loving audience and sought to engage with its fans through a fun online campaign.

Car insurance isn’t something that usually sparks much excitement but with Swiftcover we tapped into the music festival spirit with a Facebook app and interactive challenge to social media fans to devise the “Summer’s Hottest Playlist”. The campaign worked in collaboration with top Absolute Radio DJs and Spotify.  Facebook fans increased by 280% in a two-week period, and 22,000 people voted for the playlist.

We were also very pleased to receive recognition of our work with Virgin Holidays’ January Sale in SEO, where we beat our sales target by 168%!
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So it’s smiles all round.

John Barton, Head of Social Media and Lynsey Galashan, Senior Accout Executive, receiving the award for ‘Best Digital Strategy’ on Friday night.

At Steak Social we are big advocates of community building. We are all about shifting the marketing relationship between brand and consumer, from a traditional monologue approach to a relationship which is collaborative, engaging and beneficial to both parties. In my opinion, this is the next natural step for digital marketing as channels such as Facebook become arguably the most valuable digital real estate in the savvy internet user’s daily life.

In addition to the obvious benefits of fostering a direct relationship with your consumer, brands within the Facebook environment also stand to gain from earned media or word of mouth. The value of earned media is pretty straight forward and is certainly something we can all relate to. Why? Because Word-of-Mouth, and the advocacy/recommendation of a trusted individual or body is older than advertising itself. In fact one of the core goals of any advertising campaign is to gain the advocacy of influencers within social circles ie. Your friends and associates.

Social media and Facebook in particular has made earned media more accessible than ever. When a user engages with a brand on Facebook, this interaction is posted to the newsfeed of users within that individual’s circle of friends. In many ways it’s like an indirect recommendation or advocacy building trust for that brand.

So we can all see the perceived benefits of earned media in that context, but what about real revenue? This has always been the sticking point for Social which few brands have managed to leverage well.

Facebook attempts to facilitate revenue generation within the Social space by working with mobile technology to generate not only footfall in the real world but real accountable sales. Voucher codes are nothing new and mobile voucher technology is certainly nothing new. However when combined with Facebook’s huge user base and their simple technology, the value of Word-of-Mouth or earned media has the opportunity to be truly accountable to revenue. I suspect this provides the best platform for the success of this strategy to date and I will be paying close attention to how rivals like Foursquare react and adapt to these developments. Particularly within the UK where their user base really needs to grow.

However it’s worth remembering that we should not use this technology to judge the true overall value of Word of Mouth. Lest we fall into the same trap as digital display where clients often negate the value of brand engagement and recall in favour of conversion and sales.

Everything you need to know about Facebook Check-In Deals:

• Deals: A new way to connect with customers: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100163028835713
• How-to create a deal : http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100163034713933
• Deals collateral guide for businesses: https://www.box.net/shared/static/i4i9aqk0yz.pdf
• Help center FAQs: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18846

Thanks to Alex Wright over at Facebook for the above resource.

John Barton – Head of Planning & Social Media

Swiftcover.com, the pioneer in online insurance, launches a fun campaign to celebrate the end of the summer.  Using social media and supporting display campaign, swiftcover.com calls on users to upload their favourite photos to its Facebook app from 27 September-10 October.  The photos aren’t the usual shots of people partying: the call is for the saddest faces to “mourn the passing of the British summer”.  Users will also be able to download a playlist of the best of the summer festival music.

The gallery of sad faces will feature on the swiftcover.com Facebook page, updated in real-time, and can be linked to users’ own Facebook pages.  The winner of the best “mourning” face will be announced w/c 11 October, judged by swiftcover.com and will win a Red Letter DayTM experience day voucher worth £300; further prizes include 20 Spotify premium accounts worth £2,400.

The interactive campaign including display advertising, social media activity and advertising in casual games; was devised and conceived by swiftcover.com’s digital agency Steak.  Steak also designed and developed the “Summer Mourning” Facebook application. 

Visitors to the swiftcover.com Facebook page can download a best of the summer festivals top 25 tracks, voted by music fans, from a playlist devised by swiftcover.com, Absolute Radio and Steak.  The list is available for free download via Spotify from 27th September.

Tina Shortle, Marketing Director of Swiftcover says, “We’re excited that social media remains at the heart of this campaign. Last spring, our ‘favourite tracks of the summer’ playlist successfully encouraged sharing between Facebook users, and with the success of this year’s summer festivals; the Summer Mourning campaign and its best of festivals playlist is a fun way of engaging with our audience around the popular subject of the end of the British summer through posting up sad faces. We’ve been delighted to partner with Absolute Radio and Spotify to create Britain’s favourite festival music playlist and it’s been great to see Facebook users take part to vote for their favourite tracks.”
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John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media at Steak says ” Music and summer festivals are effective passion points for the swiftcover.com demographic and form the basis of our content strategy and Spotify playlist voting campaign. Swiftcover.com is utilising social channels to interact with their audience in an accessible way. People love to share their photographs and then ‘upload a photo to enter’ format is effective for community building. However this format is nothing new. We wanted to close the summer strategy in a different, fun and memorable way by poking fun at the winter blues after an amazing summer of music festivals with swiftcover.com and Absolute radio.”

Kate Hussey, Head of Display at Steak says “We are once again excited about extending the field of our current social activity to further develop a relationship between consumer and client. We believe that integration between all digital and other advertising channels is crucial to gain stand out, but essentially, it’s finding a connection with your consumers that will gain, the all important, traction. We are delighted to partner with a client who is constantly pushing the boundaries of building consumer relationships through digital”.

Really pleased to have been included in the media agency section of NMA’s ‘Top 100 Interactive Agencies’ guide for 2010. This guide lists the top 100 digital, design & build and technical agencies on income earned, but also separately ranks media agencies by gross billings, and it’s in this section that Steak appears. For more info take a look at: http://top100.nma.co.uk/

From the NMA site – “Steak has started building capabilities in mobile and social media over the last year, appointing Mark-Antony Baker as head of mobile and John Barton as its first head of planning and social media.
According to Steak, social media has become an integral part of campaigns. Key projects in this area have included work for Swiftcover, partnering the online insurer with Absolute Radio, Spotify and Facebook to encourage its audience to vote for their favourite songs and to create the ‘summer’s hottest playlist’.”

See press clippings below:

Setting the scene:
Facebook Places was announced yesterday and saw Facebook make their long awaited first steps into geolocation, an area currently dominated by Foursquare and Gowalla. These location based social apps are becoming more popular amongst business and marketers as a way to target people at specific locations, for example checking in at a Starbucks to earn rewards and free coffee. They have huge potential for campaigns, but are currently hindered by relatively small user numbers; they rely mainly on early adopters and have yet to really penetrate the lives of the average social network user.

Why is Facebook significant?
Facebook becoming a player in this game is significant because of the sheer scale of their membership. They already have the audience; they just need to bring the geolocation option into their Facebook experience.

Mobile:
Though Facebook can be accessed as standard via mobile, currently Facebook Places is only available iPhones, or geolocation enabled smart phones from the Facebook Touch mobile site. Currently there is no app available for android or blackberry devices, though they are planned at some stage.

Availability:
Places is only available in the US at the moment and no dates have been released for an international launch.

How does it work:
For the average user, Places will become an option whereby you ‘allow’ Facebook to know your location. Then you will be able to share this with your friends, find out where they are, and discover places nearby. You can add new places when you visit them, and tag yourself and your friends at locations much like you can currently do with photographs and video, and just like the current tagging options, you don’t need permission to tag your friends at locations, this has raised privacy issues already.
Your check-ins will automatically appear in your profile, in your friend’s news stream, and the news stream of your current ‘Place’. These can all be modified in your privacy settings much like everything else you can currently share on Facebook.

Clients:
Clients will be able to ‘claim’ their business’ on Places. Whether they’ve been added by themselves or someone else, owners will be able to claim ownership and automatically set up a Facebook business page which will then house and stream all the check-ins people make from their business. So essentially your local coffee house will have its own page acting as a live message board broadcasting customer check-ins.

Development:
Facebook will be making a Places API available to developers to scrape information from public places, and information users allow to be shared, so there should be an oncoming influx of interesting location based apps and games for Facebook users that will seek to take advantage of this new feature, Gowalla and Foursquare have been given access to Places, so checkins can be posted across both networks.

In practice:
Facebook as a platform for marketing becomes even more powerful with Places. Users opting to share their location become open to very focussed and direct marketing opportunities, and there is also the ‘game’ element of geolocation, earning rewards for checkins, following ‘treasure hunts’ around cities, finding out about exclusive and secret locations and so on. These are all ways companies are already using Gowalla and Foursquare to market to customers, with the 500million+ users Facebook currently boasts, the scope for these campaigns becomes even greater and the potential all the more interesting and exciting.

John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media

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List voted by music lovers through social media app

The campaign from swiftcover.com, the pioneer in online insurance, offered music lovers the chance to create this “Summer’s Hottest Playlist” in collaboration with Absolute Radio.  Building on their ‘Get a Life’ campaign, swiftcover.com extended the campaign theme to encourage users to ‘get a life’ this summer by voting for the summer’s hottest tracks. The campaign devised by Steak, used Facebook as the main hub, hosting an easy-to-use voting application.

A master playlist of 75 tracks was selected by popular Absolute Radio DJs: Christian O’Connell, Geoff Lloyd and Ben Jones.  Spotify and Absolute Radio listeners were prompted by the DJs to visit the Swiftcover Facebook page and voted daily for two weeks via the “sucks” or “rocks” buttons beside the track. This saw the music tracks physically rising and falling, depending on popularity, on the Facebook “chart”.

The final playlist hosted is hosted by Spotify on 22 June through the summer; with Facebook fans, Absolute Radio and Spotify listeners being notified that the winning list can be downloaded and played all summer long.

The idea was conceived by Steak, who is handling the social media and online display campaign.  Audio and display ads including billboards and takeover pages, will appear on Spotify, Absolute Radio and Facebook linking through to swiftcover.com’s Facebook page.  The Facebook app songs then link back to Spotify, which enables visitors to the site to listen to the tracks they’re voting for; and there is an opportunity to win a Spotify premium account for a year.
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Tina Shortle, Marketing Director says, “This is a perfect campaign for the summer – sitting in the park in the sunshine listening to music that you’ve voted for – it epitomises our ‘Get a Life’ campaign.  We’re excited that social media was at the heart of this campaign. Absolute Radio, Facebook and Spotify are the perfect partners for music lovers to create this ‘Summer’s Hottest Playlist’”.

John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media at Steak says “We wanted to demonstrate how we can effectively integrate social media into our existing through the line digital strategy. This campaign is ultimately about building and fostering relationships between swiftcover.com and their audience in social channels that they’re comfortable with by adding value rather than selling. Music and summer festivals are effective passion point or the swiftcover.com
demographic and form the basis of our content strategy. We are excited and fortunate to work with brands like swiftcover.com who continue to lead the way in digital marketing within the insurance vertical sector”.

Kate Hussey, Head of Display at Steak says “We are excited about enhancing the current Absolute Radio partnership for swiftcover.com along with introducing another key strategic partner, Spotify, as a main driver of our audience. We believe that this campaign has the ability to kick off a summer full of ‘Getting a Life’”.

Bing announced on their blog (http://mashable.com/bing-local-twitter-trends/) today they have created maps with Mashable that show which topics are trending on Twitter in locations around the world.

Whilst much of the content on Twitter is the digital industry talking to itself – especially in the UK – this is one interesting example of search engines using social data.

I believe we’ll see more social data used to enhance the quality and relevancy of search results and news sites; it sends a signal of what is of interest to the public that the engines and savvy publishers will be keen to plug into their algorithms.

For example: if a political candidate is receiving a lot of mentions in social media by people located in the south east of England, and somebody in that region goes to Google news, news stories about that candidate could be boosted up the page.

This could be extend into search, too – pushing sites up the listings based on social data for the searchers region.

Duncan Parry, Co-founder and Head of Paid Search